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Download textbooks to your Brain

Quick, grab the tinfoil hats. Researchers at the University of Washington have succeeded in linking two human brains together via the Internet.

In an experiment conducted by Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, Rao was able to send a brain signal via the Internet to his colleague situated on the other side of the university campus that forced him to involuntarily move her finger on a keyboard.

The result, which is being hailed as the world's first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, was performed using head-mounted electrodes which were plugged into an electroencephalography machine with the captured signals sent via the Internet.

Although this is a very primitive example of hacking a brain, if perfected, the possibilities are endless. "The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," Stocco said. "We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain." In other words being able to download a textbook straight into a person's knowledge centers, or the ability to speak foreign languages or, for those with a hankering for the film "The Matrix," martial arts fighting skills.

However, the possibilities are also more than a little creepy, as Rao concedes. "It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," he said. "This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains."

Still, Rao, who jokingly refers to the experiment as a 'Vulcan Mind Meld," was also quick to highlight that this process is not about reading thoughts despite its sci-fi connotations. Rather it is about identifying and transmitting simple brain commands and therefore would not give anyone the power to control another person's thoughts or actions against their will.

Similar experiments have been performed in the past -- researchers at Duke University demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats and Harvard researchers have demonstrated the same phenomenon between a person and a rat -- this is the first time both subjects have been human. "Brain-computer interface is something people have been talking about for a long, long time," said Chantel Prat, assistant professor in psychology at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and Stocco's wife and research partner who helped conduct the experiment. "We plugged a brain into the most complex computer anyone has ever studied, and that is another brain."

The next step is to attempt to send more complex information from one human brain to another and then eventually to open up the test group to see if the command can be sent to multiple recipients.

[SIZE=]Long story short Mind meld is now a REALITY[/SIZE]

Last edited by Jean Grey; 09-09-2013 at 03:50 PM.
Reason: Please do not use such a large text unnecessarily..

Re: Download textbooks to your Brain

"lol"

Was my response.

The possibilities with this are exceptionally limited. We've been able to do similar things to this for quite some time with laboratory mice (look up "remote controlled mouse").

The problem is that it's really only interfacing with a very narrow region of the brain involving motor control. If one were to compare it to a computer - it is an "output" to a control interface. If your body were a computer monitor - your spine would be the HDMI and the area these people are interfacing with would be the frame-buffer of the video card (region which stores the 'pictures' to be transmitted to the monitor).

The problem is that more complicated neurology exists in things like memory, speech, and decision making.

They've already run into considerable difficulty with individual neurological differences simply in the area of motor-control (hence the need for a computer to 'translate' between the two, in this case... but they didn't really explain that). These differences are even greater when it comes to how people process information and retain it as a memory.

Downloading a textbook into your brain will never be possible. The brain doesn't even begin to work in that manner.

Now, what will be possible is, say, to store books and other reference material on, say, your smart-phone, and then a small nanobot-constructed wireless interface accesses your smartphone and allows you to 'read' (without 'reading') books and references from search results on a whim. You might retain that experience as a memory - but without 'reading' everything on your phone, retaining it as a memory is simply not possible. Numerous studies have indicated that memory in the brain is decentralized in nature, and the process for forming it has little similarity to how a computer stores and recalls information.